


the colour of my soul

by C_AND_B



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 18:27:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10814358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/C_AND_B/pseuds/C_AND_B
Summary: In a world where you see everything in your soulmate's eye colour until you kiss them, Clarke wants more (Lexa might just find a way to accomodate that).





	the colour of my soul

**Author's Note:**

> This was more difficult than anticipated, and I'm not entirely sure about it, but it exists so fuck it - hope it's not shit, sorry for any mistakes, etc.

Green. Clarke spends the first thirteen years of her life overcome by green. She memorises the shades, catalogues each hue, becomes old friends with emerald, and olive, and mint, and learns she hates any and all foods coloured lime. She doesn’t enjoy it.

Her mother tells her the sky should be blue, and most of her clothes are black, and that the grass, well, the grass actually is green. Her parents label her paints, organise her pencils in alphabetical order and tell her that her paintings are as realistic as they are beautiful. It sucks. Staring at an array of greens and knowing there is so much more to the world sucks.

She knows the concept is nice. She knows she shouldn’t mind enduring a monochromatic world if it results in her finding someone made for her - without the added trouble of having to weed out the assholes along the course of her life. She knows it’s supposed to feel like a blessing but it seems more like penance. She’s not against soulmates. She’s not against love. She’s just extremely against looking through her window and seeing nothing but green.

She wants more. She wants to know why her father’s smile brightens when he sees the colour blue, wants to know what her shirt looks like covered in paint and never washed, wants to experience the world in technicolour, wants to see the red of her blood and feel like it’s something real, at least something truer than the ridiculous pine she watches drip from scrapes and cuts. Clarke wants to understand what people mean when they say colours make you _feel_ \- wants to feel something other than hopeful and confined by shades of green.

Clarke spends the first thirteen years of her life seeing everything in green.

(In the end, she’s mostly just thankful it’s not brown).

* * *

 

Clarke’s fourteen when she wakes up one morning and opens her eyes to a vibrant pink. Everywhere. Everything. Pink. It startles her at first, like you imagine it would considering she’d spent her entire life consumed by green. The ‘ _what does it mean?_ ’ frenzy that follows is immediate, and panicked, and escalates quickly. She wonders if her soulmate is in pain, or going blind, or somehow severing their tie. To say she goes to the worst possible scenarios would be correct, if not a slight understatement.

She climbs into her parents’ bed after spending five minutes staring at her room - half in wonder and half in sheer terror. They’re calm as they tell her there are ways to change the colours, as they assure her that her soulmate has simply put in contacts so that Clarke can experience something more. Contact lenses seem too simple to Clarke, too mundane, too easy and yet they’re the reason she can see pink. She finally knows what the flamingos on the nature channel really look like, can finally understand what her mom means when she says it’s so vibrant, and bewitching, and bright.

_So bright._

Clarke decides halfway through the day that she loves pink, absolutely adores it - coral, and rose, and fuchsia, and that she finally knows what the blush on her mom’s face really looks like when her dad tells her he loves her, or that she’s the most beautiful women he’s ever seen.

She also decides that she loves her soulmate for thinking she might like to see it, decides that she’s happy spending the rest of her life with someone who would do that for her. She wonders if they knew. Clarke wonders if someone, with an unknown face, in an unknown place, had laid up at night like she did, and knew that the ache in their chest was Clarke - Clarke’s desire to experience something more, her sense of longing, her belief that something was missing, something that was creating a hole in her chest that she was desperately scrambling to fill.

(The first new colour Clarke experiences is pink.

She loves it).

* * *

 

When Clarke is fifteen she has her first real kiss and everything is orange.

She knows they aren’t her soulmate even before she kisses them. The kiss itself is too hard, too sloppy, has too much teeth. Clarke almost begins to think that kissing isn’t for her until she gets her second real kiss the same night and finds that girls are much softer, calmer, finds that they kiss like they have no destination, no goal, only the hopes that they get to revel in one last touch of lips before reality comes crashing back in (or before someone comes crashing into the closet screaming that it’s been seven minutes).

Clarke loves orange - not because it reminds her of soft lips and gentle curves, but because it makes her feel alive. Orange makes Clarke feel happy, and light, and like everything will be alright. Orange makes her feel excited, which is probably mostly due to the fact that she can finally paint the sunrise.

Her dad tells her that she’ll love it even more when she can see them all, when she can see all the colours. He tells her about the yellows and the pinks that intermingle with the orange in the sky - the way they become one entity, the way they burst and fade and make your heart clench just so. Clarke can’t wait to see the sunrise, and the sunset, and every glance of the sun in between when it’s encased by blue and shining on greens, and greys, and every other colour imaginable.

Clarke spends two weeks enamoured by orange. Two weeks cataloguing the shift in shades of a flickering flame, the slight discordance of colour between fruits she was sure had all been the same exact shade, the way orange was sometimes the brightest thing she’d ever seen and then darker than anything she’d ever experienced before.

(Clarke can easily state that she hates early mornings...

She still spends two weeks rising with the morning sun).

* * *

 

Red makes Clarke feel disorientated. It makes her feel angry and fiery but impassioned and strong. It feels like it’s too much and not enough all at once. She slips and scrapes her knee on the second day and can’t recall how long she simply stands there watching crimson ooze onto rose. It makes her feel more alive than she’s ever been. It makes everything feel more real. It makes _her_ feel more real.

She paints a picture entirely of reds, writes vitality in the corner with the pen labelled black, and stares at it on her easel until she’s called down for dinner.

(Clarke is sixteen when she finally feels real).

* * *

Clarke spends a day experiencing brown before it’s replaced with yellow and she’s shocked by the contrast. Where brown makes her feel grounded, yellow makes her feel elevated. Where yellow makes her feel happy, brown makes her feel mellow. Brown is calming, serene... boring. Yellow has Clarke trying to limit her blinks so that she doesn’t waste a moment surrounded by light.

That what yellow is. _Light_.

Yellow is smiles, and rays of light trickling through window panes, and flowers blooming in early spring. Yellow makes Clarke feel happy, and warm, and happy once again. Yellow makes Clarke feel radiant. It makes her feel childish, enough so that she doesn’t hesitate to add a rubber duck to her bubble bath, nor attempt to hide that fact from her dad who wastes no time in laughing when he discovers it.

Yellow follows Clarke when she closes her eyes, and overtakes her dreams with vibrancy and brilliance. Yellow makes Clarke forget her troubles, makes them seem so far away, makes them seem nonexistent. Yellow gives Clarke hope.

(Yellow has Clarke wide awake in the late hours of the night, bewitched by the way the stars glow just that little bit brighter).

* * *

Clarke hates blue.

She spent years hoping to experience it. All she wanted for her birthday was to see the sky in all its glory, to drift out into the sea and be enveloped by the colour both literally and metaphorically. She wanted to look at the world the way her soulmate did, to look around her town and know what they would see, feel what they may feel, to imagine, if only for a moment, that they weren’t so far away, that they were by her side.

She could do with them being by her side.

She hates blue.

Clarke hates blue because when she wakes up to cerulean, and turquoise, and sapphire, all she feels is sadness. All she feels is numb. She doesn’t open her eyes to blue jeans, or the blue sky. She definitely doesn’t find the sea. All she can see is her dad in a hospital bed, shrouded in blue.

She hates it. She hates the way she knows exactly the colour of the tears that streak down her mother’s face, that she can pinpoint the shade that overtakes her father’s trembling lips. She hates that all she can feel is scared, and agitated, and broken. She hates that it still makes her hands tremble, and her pulse race, and her mind whirr because it is beautiful. Blue is beautiful but this... this moment in her life isn’t. This moment sucks. Watching her dad suffer sucks, and she hates blue just that little bit more because it gives her an odd sense of hope - a last little sliver that she knows will be her downfall if this all goes wrong, if her dad...

Her dad tells her it’s his favourite colour, that it has been ever since the day she was born and he got caught up in her gaze. He tells her that he’s glad she got to experience it with him, that he got to experience it with her. Clarke’s dad tells her for three days straight that she should go see the ocean before the blue disappears or, at the very least, find some deep sea documentary to enjoy.

Clarke doesn’t move. She barely sees the sky, barely sees anything other than four blue hospital walls, and a blue nurse who _always_ sends her a sympathetic smile that _always_ makes her feel worse, because she thinks she knows what it means - she’s proved right a week later when she sobs silently under the deafening flat line. She clutches desperately to him even as blue hands attempt to drag her away, even as blue mouths move with empty words and empty sympathies, even as her mother adds her own iron grasp to the man who once made her world explode in colour.

Clarke falls asleep in a blue bed, in her mother’s blue arms, surrounded by her father’s blue things. She feels blue. She never understood the expression until that moment, never thought it made any sense until she was living it.

When she wakes up everything is green. She silently thanks her soulmate, silently wonders like she always does if they can sense the way she’s feeling, sense that she needed to open her eyes to something soothing, something constant.

Clarke still drives to the ocean. She still watches the waves crash against the shore for hours, still spends the whole time imagining what an orange sun would look like spread across a blue sea splashed with red buoys and multicoloured boats, and a blue sky splattered with white clouds.

(It doesn’t stop her thinking about her father.

It doesn’t eclipse blue smothered nightmares and suffocating blue blinks).

* * *

 

The first time Clarke sees her everything is purple.

She decides in that second that it’s her favourite colour. She also decides they’re going to be friends, no matter how many glares the girl sends towards anyone who tries to sit beside her in the lecture hall. They’re going to be friends (after Clarke manages to gather her thoughts enough to conjure a coherent sentence that is).

The purple girl has plum hair and lavender eyes and somehow, in a room full to the brim with purples, that’s all that Clarke can see. All she can see is a pretty girl sitting alone and glaring at any and all people that try to be her desk partner.

Maybe it should be intimidating. Maybe it should put Clarke off. Maybe it should make Clarke stay in her seat on the other side of the room. But somehow it’s charming. Somehow it’s attractive. Somehow Clarke’s pushing herself to her feet, and letting them carry her in that direction on their own volition, because she can’t quite find it in herself to stop moving.

She doesn’t stop walking because she wants this. She wants to hear a flowery tone fall from violet lips. She wants to feel her orchid hands. She wants to know her name, and her story, and maybe, _just maybe_ , if the girl has spent her life living in hues of blue. Clarke’s blue.

“Mind if I sit?” She sounds more confident than she feels as she phrases a statement like a question, and pretends she’s not planning to sit down there whatever the answer.  Thankfully, as the girl looks up, with sharp words and a glare at the ready, she spots Clarke and immediately softens.

Clarke’s not sure what it is - if maybe her smile was just that bit brighter than anyone else who had tried, if maybe the low cut top she haphazardly tore from her closet that day had worked in her favour, if maybe it was just the fact that she was the first girl who tried and Clarke was a better option than any of the number of boys who gave sitting here a go.

But, whatever the reason, the girl slips her bag from the seat beside her silently and gestures for Clarke to sit in wordless acceptance. For a moment Clarke thinks she might speak. She watches Clarke for a few seconds, opens her mouth every few heartbeats before ruefully shaking her head, obviously having decided the two of them talking is a bad idea.

Clarke disagrees.

“I’m Clarke by the way,” she offers, awkwardly reaching her hand across the miniscule divide between them. The girl stares. Her eyes dart from eyes, to lips, to a hand, to eyes and continue on without a single word trickling off her tongue. Usually Clarke would give up. Usually Clarke would withdraw her hand with a grimace and accept defeat. But Clarke doesn’t usually sit next to a purple girl and feel a knot in her chest that she thinks might loosen, just a little, if only the girl would tell her a name. “Do you have a name?” She prompts, her shaking hand staying strong.

“A name?” The girl asks as though that’s the first thing she’s heard Clarke say. Clarke chuckles lowly as she dutifully nods her head, puts the hitch in the girl’s chest as she grasps Clarke’s hand down to her own overactive imagination. “Lexa. My name is Lexa.”

_Lexa_.

Clarke runs the name through her mind (knows that it’ll be running through it without her permission later that night when she tries to sleep). It’s a pretty name. It’s a pretty voice. A voice that fits soft lips and intricate braids, but contradicts sharp glares and hard muscle. A voice that sends a shiver down Clarke’s spine as she imagines it husky and raw in the dark of the night. A voice that she thinks she would give almost anything to hear sounding her way again.

“Nice name.”

“Nice face,” the girl, _Lexa_ , replies almost instantly. She tears her hand away from Clarke’s quickly when the words settle in her brain, instead focusing all of her attention on the professor who had finally arrived, and the death grip she was applying on her pen.

Clarke doesn’t even debate doing the same. Clarke spends the hour watching Lexa who vehemently refuses to look her way and attempts to translate her likeness to paper. She sketches her with a purple pen because she wants to capture this, wants to remember a purple girl, with a purple glare and fumbling words.

When their dismissal is announced, and Clarke watches Lexa slowly pack away her things like she’s waiting for something, she decides to be brave. She writes ‘ _you have a nice face too’_ at the bottom of her drawing, adds her number for good measure, and slips the sheet into Lexa’s eye line before flinging her bag over her shoulder and walking away.

She doesn’t go far. She moves just enough so that Lexa can’t see her but that she can see Lexa - a sentence which sounds far more stalkery when put into words rather than thought, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it because she gets to see a purple blush, and a purple smile, and she feels her purple heart hammering in her chest because she won’t say it aloud, but she doesn’t think Lexa is just another pretty girl with a pretty name, she thinks she is something.

(She knows Lexa is _something_ ).

* * *

 

Lexa in green is enchanting. In yellow she’s a force to be reckoned with. Coated in orange, and sending tentative smiles Clarke’s way, she’s vibrant. In red she’s beautiful and Clarke’s almost feeling reckless enough to kiss her when Lexa brings round the notes for the class she missed. Lexa is ineffable in any colour but in grey...in grey she’s something else.

Clarke had never put much stock in the colour, never expected to see it until it was intermingled with every other colour under the sun, but there’s something about a grey world that feels both utterly right and terribly wrong. Right because for the first time Clarke is seeing everything for its shape, and its details instead being distracted by light and colour. Wrong because she feels colourful. With Lexa by her side, Clarke feels colourful.

They’d been hanging out more and more after Clarke finally managed to convince Lexa to actually use her number. It took two weeks and Clarke persistently sitting next to her in every class they shared for Lexa to give in (or, as Clarke likes to think, it took Lexa two weeks to be so utterly charmed by her that she couldn’t help but text her).

It took a week for Clarke to talk Lexa into actually entering her room, another three days to make her feel comfortable enough that she sat tentatively on the bed. Two weeks later, in grey sweatpants and with a grey smile, Lexa sat happily next to Clarke as they continued on with Clarke’s list of programmes that Lexa absolutely had to watch instead of documentary after documentary.

She’s not sure where the question comes from.

That’s a lie.

She knows exactly where the question comes from. It comes from weeks of curiosity, weeks of feeling her body tremble every time Lexa’s hand so much as grazes hers, weeks of wanting to ask, weeks of wanting to know, weeks of feeling like she already knew the answer but being too afraid to act on sweaty palms and a hunch.

“Have you seen more colours?” Clarke blurts out, too loudly to be casual, too rushed to not be charged. She meant to be a little bit more suave. She meant to ease into the discussion, feel out the situation, but with Lexa turning to her with curious eyes, and a jaw almost slack with shock, Clarke knows it’s too late for calm, collected interrogation.

“More?”

“I mean, have you seen anything other than your soulmates eye colour?” Clarke is afraid. She’s afraid that she’s building this up, that she’s putting too much faith in a racing pulse and heated skin. She’s afraid that, when she finally gives into the urge to kiss Lexa, she’ll open her eyes and find a monochromatic world still turning.

“No,” Lexa says simply, but she studies Clarke curiously like she knows exactly what she’s trying to figure out, like she might just want to test the hypothesis herself. “Sometimes I feel them, like my soulmate is experiencing them and I’m getting this second hand euphoria.” It’s an offering and, paired with the thoughtful way Lexa runs her fingers along her cheekbone just below her right eye, it’s a loaded offering.

“What’s their favourite?” Clarke pushes, shifting closer, closing the last gap between their bodies. She watches the gentle pattern Lexa’s fingertips draw on her face, unable to bring herself to catch her gaze because this is it. Make or break.

(Clarke’s not sure she can survive the latter).

“It changes all the time. I think maybe purple, but that could just be me projecting because I was having a good day that day.” Lexa’s fingers halt in their path, drop from her face a second later. Clarke continues to stare at the space they vacate until soft fingertips tilt her chin and she finds hopeful grey eyes that beg her to ask the question.

“What day?” It’s quiet. The question. Her words are no more than a whisper, but she knows that Lexa heard, knows that it’s what causes the hand at her jaw to shake slightly even though she initiated this. Clarke catches it with her own, slides their palms together soothingly, refuses to look away from the eyes in front of her.

She _wants_ to know.

She _needs_ to know.

“The day I met you,” Lexa replies shakily, slipping her fingers into the spaces Clarke’s leave behind. It’s that movement that has Clarke truly struck with the need to kiss Lexa. She’s thought about it before. Honestly, she’s practically always thinking about it but here, now... now she really needs to kiss her, and not just to find out the answer to the unspoken question in the air.

Clarke doesn’t just want to kiss Lexa to know if she’s her soulmate. Clarke wants to kiss Lexa to find out if her chapstick really tastes like cherry, or to discover if she was lying when she said she didn’t steal the last maple donut from the box on Clarke’s desk. Clarke wants to kiss Lexa because Lexa makes her feel warm, and soft, and comfortable, and she knows that kissing her would only serve to heighten the hammering in her chest and the rapid rush of blood through her veins.

“Are you wearing grey lenses?”

“I-“ Lexa begins, her body tilting subconsciously closer to Clarke’s, her lips falling an inch away from Clarke’s own. Lexa doesn’t manage to finish her words, doesn’t manage to close the gap that the two of them had been working on closing for weeks now (even if they hadn’t quite realised it). She doesn’t kiss Clarke because she’s too busy being interrupted by Clarke’s roommate and running out before they can even begin to talk about what almost happened.

Clarke spends the rest of her evening alternating between glaring at her roommate and staring at her phone - half debating texting Lexa, and half waiting to receive something, _anything_ , from her first.

Neither of them text.

Neither of them sleep.

Clarke stares at her ceiling for hours, her fingers itching to draw the furrow in Lexa’s brow, the unsure smile on her lips, the shine that persisted in her eyes when she stared at Clarke, the shine that defied every idea of grey Clarke ever had.

A grey world is beautiful.

(Translation: Lexa is beautiful in grey).

* * *

 

Clarke kisses Lexa when everything is green. 

It feels like a full circle.

Clarke kisses Lexa the day after her almost confession. The day after a night of restless hours. The day after a morning of panicked pacing, and rehearsing words, and anxiously taking up biting her nails again because she really needed some kind of solace.

Clarke kisses Lexa without preamble. She’s closing the divide between them the moment she catches Lexa’s eye from across the quad, not giving herself time to question it. She doesn’t allow Lexa to finish her hello. She doesn’t pay attention to the girl with curious eyes standing by Lexa’s side, nor the various other people who had evidently decided that watching this would be far more fun than actually going to class.

Clarke doesn’t stop, or think, or halt.

She just does.

She tries to kiss Lexa softly, tries to ease them both into it. She fails. Miserably. Clarke kisses Lexa with a fervour built from weeks of pent up tension, with a need that stems from curiosity, and want, and the coil in her stomach that hasn’t subsided since the first time she heard Lexa laugh. Clarke kisses Lexa with unflinching, unforgiving, unbridled lips. Clarke kisses Lexa with a purposeful mouth and even more determined hands. She trails her fingers across a sharp jaw, tangles them in perfectly braided hair, traces mindless patterns on the back of Lexa’s neck. Her hands slide to Lexa’s hips as the kiss tapers off, tugging Lexa that last inch closer, grounding herself to that moment.

For a few seconds Clarke refuses to open her eyes. She refuses because she’s a little afraid that everything might still be green, but also because she’s a lot excited to see everything in full and vibrant colours for the first time in her life.

She clenches her eyes shut, clenches her hands in the fabric of Lexa’s jacket, feels her heart clench in her chest when Lexa’s lips brush hers lightly again - teasingly, daringly...fearfully. It’s that touch that makes Clarke realise Lexa is just as afraid as she is, that hadn’t dared open her eyes in case it ruined the moment either. In case their kiss is nothing more than a kiss.

Clarke takes a deep breath...

Open her eyes...

The world explodes.

(And fuck... Lexa is _beautiful_ ).

**Author's Note:**

> Hit me up on tumblr I guess: c--and--b


End file.
